This one was the part I didnt think my wife would love but she doesnt seem to mind at all. After talking with numerous people I found that running my own internal Plex server was the answer to my problems. Now I know that not everyone has a machine just sitting around but I had a microserver I used for testing but it is only in heavy use a few times a year. I decided this box would be perfect to use a Plex Media Server (PMS). For those of you who are not familiar, the Plex Media Server catalogs your movies and TV shows and even music and home movies and presents them via a webpage or app to allow them to be streamed either internally only or over the internet if you so choose. Since I already had most of my movies digital, this meant nothing more than installing the software on Windows (it is available for Linux and Mac as well). Once it was installed I created a library from my movies folder and I was off and running. You can also set things like TV Shows, these are even sorted by season and episodes. there are lots of software packages out there that will help you get access to all the movies and shows you want but I am going to decline to go into those.

I then made sure the Plex app was installed on all my devices around the house and I am ready to go, I have access. What I didnt realize when I started this was that I would need to go get the Plex Pass paid version, for a few reasons, the first was the ability to have household users. I have a user created for myself and my wife so that we can be watching different things. Without this, anytime you connect and try to watch something and another person is watching something else on another device, you will kick them off. This clearly was not going to be a solution and the paid version of Plex gave me user capability. If you have kids this can be very useful also since you can limit what folders they have access to.

Another bid benefit for me of the full paid version was offline sync capability. I can not connect my ipad and download shows and movies from my server for when I am offline, for instance when I am traveling.

One more benefit of plex is that I can share things like my Christmas movie collection with my family without ever having to get on a a plane or in a car and I can simply add them as friends and give them access to my library.

This paid version is $40 a year or $119 for lifetime, I opted for the $40 a year only because I like to give some constant support to companies that are writing software I use.